Healthy Cooking Basics

show you how to make fried foods without all the calories and saturated fat . I am skipping the deep fryer and I'm going to make Oven-Fried Chicken. It's going to be delicious. So I get started by removing the skin from my pieces of chicken. That's going to save me on calories and saturated fat . I use a paper towel to hold onto the skin, grip it and pull it right off. Once that's done, make the marinade. So I whisk together buttermilk, a little minced garlic , mustard and hot sauce. That's going to tenderize the chicken and give added flavor. It'll be delicious. So let it soak in that for an hour or up to eight hours in the refrigerator. Then when you're ready to cook, make your coating. So we're using whole-wheat flour, that's going to add a little bit of fiber and nutrients compared to regular all-purpose flour. Then we're going with sesame seeds for some crunch, paprika, thyme and baking powder. I whisk that all together. Put it into a ziplock bag and then I remove my chicken pieces from the marinade. Put them into the ziplock bag one or two at a time and shake them all around until they're coated. Now you want to put this on a rack that is set on a baking sheet. The rack is going to let hot air circulate all around the chicken so it cooks evenly. Spray it with olive oil cooking spray all over. That's going to help it get crispy and golden. Put it in a hot oven that's 425 degrees and bake it until it's cooked through. That should be about 40 to 50 minutes. That's it. You have just made delicious oven-fried chicken and you've saved yourself 225 calories and 4 grams of saturated fat per serving. For this Oven-Fried Chicken and more healthy comfort food makeovers, go to eatingwell.com.

anthocyanins. Those are antioxidants which help keep your heart healthy and help fight cancer . Now, even though eggplant is around all year long, the best time to get it is in the late summer and in the fall. That's when it's most abundant. When you're shopping for it, what you want to look for is nice, smooth, glossy skins, no wrinkles, no soft spongy spots, and it should feel a little bit heavy for its size. My favorite way to cook it is to grill it. So I take my eggplant. I slice it into half-inch-thick slices, brush those with a little bit of olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Put it in the grill pan on medium-high heat and cook it for about 8 minutes,

tablespoons of melted butter and canola oil. Now butter is high in saturated fat but it has great flavor so we just use a little bit of that. And then we cut it with heart-healthy canola oil which is low in saturated fat . Mix those wet ingredients together. When that's done, make a well in the middle of your dry ingredients . Add your wet ingredients to that. Mix it together until it's just combined, but don't overmix it because that will give you a tough baked good. And then add in your chunked-up bananas, walnuts and chocolate chips. Stir those all together until they're totally combined and that's your batter. Then transfer to your greased loaf pan . You could also use a muffin tin if you want to. Put it in the oven. Bake it about an hour and ten minutes, until it springs back when you touch the top. And that's it. You've got delicious, amazing, fresh banana -chocolate-chip bread and guess what you've saved: 300 calories and 17 grams of fat per serving compared to a traditional one. For this recipe